The content includes news articles; live text commentaries and football scores; live streams of BBC radio stations 5 Live and 5 Live Sports Extra; social and personalisation features. Live video streams will be added later in 2013.

"The app is a major step forward in our development and one that recognises the importance of mobile, right now and in the future," writes BBC Sport's head of interactive Ben Gallop in a blog post.

"A third of traffic to the site already comes from mobile - a proportion that rises to more than 40% at the weekend when live sport is going on. It won't be long until most of our audience is accessing our content through handheld devices."

In a separate blog post, executive product manager Lucie Mclean explains why the app is launching on Android later than on iPhone.

"The Android version still needs some more development work and testing to ensure it works on the wide range of Android devices available and will be live in the next few weeks," she writes.

However, the BBC Sport team have taken feedback from 2012's BBC Olympics app – which was downloaded more than 2m times – into consideration, including demand for a version optimised for Android tablets.

The new app will be available for 7-inch Android tablets, with Amazon's Kindle Fire devices to follow once it has been "thoroughly tested" on them.

The BBC has been criticised by owners of Android devices for being slow to add features to its Android apps that are already available on iOS – for example offline downloads in the iPlayer catch-up TV app.

In September 2012 the BBC's Chris Yanda told these users that "I want to reassure you that Android is an important platform for us", outlining work on the BBC Media Player technology to stream audio and video to its apps.

For now, the BBC Sport app won't be appearing on other mobile platforms including Windows Phone and BlackBerry, with Mclean citing comScore figures indicating that iOS and Android account for 75% of the UK smartphone market.

"We haven't ruled out developing the app for other platforms but building apps is expensive and as a publicly-funded organisation we have to prioritise the areas where we can reach the most users at the lowest costs," writes Mclean.

BBC Sport already has a mobile website which was relaunched in December 2012 at m.bbc.co.uk/sport with a responsive design catering for devices with screens up to seven inches, with the aim of serving a wide range of mobile phones and tablets.